The Duchess of Wrexe Part 67

But, beyond question, he could not have held the position as he did had it not been for Rachel; he seemed to see that here was a chance of seizing her and making her really his own, a chance that would never be his again. He was making an appeal to her--she was closer to him, he thought, with every day.

So his natural humour and spirits returned--At present life was tolerable; he suffered very little pain and he was aware that a number of people to whom he had never meant anything whatever now cared for him very much indeed.

He was ashamed when he heard of the men who were dying and suffering for their country--"He would have had to have gone to Africa," he told himself, "if he'd not had his accident. Then enteric or a bullet and good-bye to Rachel altogether!"

III

He had often, during those long hours, thought of the d.u.c.h.ess. He had, always, in his heart, considered her affection for him strange; he knew that it was difficult for her to be patient with fools and he knew that his own intellectual gifts were on no very high level. He based her friends.h.i.+p for him on the naive transparency with which he displayed his frankly pagan indulgences. His love for Rachel and this accident had changed all that. He was still pagan enough at heart, but there were other things in his world. Princ.i.p.ally it occurred to him now that one couldn't judge about the way things looked to other people, and the d.u.c.h.ess, of course, always _did_ judge; if they didn't look her way, why then wipe them out!

He had, in fact, much less now to say to the d.u.c.h.ess; he was afraid that he would no longer agree with her about things--"Of course she knows the world and is a d.a.m.n clever woman, but she's jolly well too hard on people who aren't quite her style--She'd put my back up, I believe, if she talked." He had, indeed, always been uncomfortable at the old lady's approaches to sentiment. She was never sentimental with other people--He _hated_ sentiment in anyone except, of course, Rachel and she never _was_ sentimental.

He looked out now upon the road that ran through the park beyond his window, watched the nursemaids and the children, the old gentlemen, the girls, the smart women and the pale young men with books and the smart young men with s.h.i.+ny hats, and he wondered about them all.

Sometimes when the gra.s.s, was very green, when high white clouds piled one upon another hung above the pond whose corner he could just see, thoughts of his little grey house, his gardens, the Downs, his horses and dogs would come to him--

"Come out! Come out!" a sparrow would dance on his window ledge--

"d.a.m.n you, I can't!" he would cry and then his eyes would fly to Rachel's photograph--"If I get her it will be worth it, won't it, Jacob, my son?"

He talked continually to Jacob and found great comfort in the stolid a.s.surance with which the dog would wag his stump of a tail--"He's more than human, that dog," he would tell Rachel; "funny how I never used to see anything in him."

Of course there were many days when life was utterly impossible; then he would snap at everyone, lie scowling at the park, curse his impotence, his miserable degraded infirmities. "Curse it, to die in a ditch like this--to be broken up, to be smashed...."

His majestic butler--now the tenderest and most devoted of attendants--stood these evil days with great equanimity.

"Bless you, of course he's bound to be wild now and again--wonder is it don't happen more often--It does him good to curse a bit."

So things were with him until the day of the d.u.c.h.ess's visit. His surprise at seeing her was confused with an a.s.surance that "she had come for something." After her departure what she had come for was plain enough to see.

He had not taken her words about Breton at first with any credulity. His princ.i.p.al emotion at the time had been anger with the old woman, a great desire that she should go before he should forget himself and be disgraced by showing temper to anyone so old and feeble--But when she had gone, he found that peace had left him now once and for all.

He knew that the d.u.c.h.ess hated Rachel and he was ready to allow for the bias and exaggeration that spite would lend, but, when that was taken away, much remained.

Rachel knew Breton, that was certain; she had never told him. Breton's name had occurred sometimes in conversation and she had always spoken of him as though he were a complete stranger. Rachel knew Breton and she had never told him....

He might tell himself that she had not told him because she knew that he would instantly stop the acquaintance--It was, of course, simply a friends.h.i.+p that had sprung up because Rachel was sorry for his ostracism. Roddy thought that that was just like Rachel, part of her warm-hearted interest in anyone who seemed to be unfairly treated--yet--she had never told him.

Then, lying there all alone with no one in whom he could confide, there sprang before him suspicions. If she had known this scoundrel of a cousin of hers, if she had been so careful to keep from her husband all cognizance of her friends.h.i.+p, did not that very silence and deceit imply more than friends.h.i.+p? Was Breton the kind of man to abstain from s.n.a.t.c.hing every advantage that was open to him? Did not this explain Rachel's avoidance of Roddy during the last year, her moods of restraint, repentance, her sudden silences?

Then upon this came the thought, how much of all this did the world know? Perhaps it was true once again that the husband was the last to be informed, perhaps during the last year all London Society had mocked at Roddy's blindness.

The d.u.c.h.ess, he might be sure, had not spared her tongue--The d.u.c.h.ess ... he cursed her as he lay there and then wondered whether he should not rather thank her for opening his eyes, then cursed himself for daring to allow such suspicions of Rachel to gain their hold upon him.

In Roddy there was, strong beyond almost any other principle, a st.u.r.dy hereditary pride. He was proud of his stock, proud of his ancestors and all their doings, worthy and unworthy, proud of his own pluck and standing--"Different from all these half-baked fellers with only their own grandmothers to go back to." It had been this arrogance, with other things somewhat closely allied, that had endeared him to the d.u.c.h.ess.

Now it was that same pride that suffered most terribly. Here was some disaster hanging over his head that threatened most nearly the honour of his family--Let Breton touch that....

He was alone on that evening after the d.u.c.h.ess's visit; Rachel had gone out to a party; she went, he had noticed, reluctantly, protested again and again that she wished she could stay with him, seemed to hang about him as though she would speak to him, looked, oh! too adorably, too adorably beautiful!

Whilst she was with him he saw behind her the dark shadow of Breton, that fellow kicked out of the country for cheating at cards or something as bad, disowned by his family, and she, she, Rachel so proudly apart, could have gone to him--He was glad when, at last, she had left him.

Then, lying there, he endured three of the most awful hours of agony that he was ever, in, all his life, to know. Nothing that had come to him through his accident was so bad as this. At one moment it was fury--wild, raging, unreasoning fury--that wished that Rachel and Breton and the d.u.c.h.ess, all of them together might suffer the torments of h.e.l.l--And then swiftly following it came his love of Rachel, nearer now to burning heights, so that he swore that, whatever she had done, he did not care, he would forgive her everything, but all that mattered was that she should be spared, that her honour should be vindicated. Then, more quietly, he reflected that he was uncertain of everything as yet, he had only that malicious old woman's word, and until he had something more solid than that he must trust Rachel.

Oh! if only she would, of her own accord, speak! If she would only sit there by his sofa and, with her hand in his, tell him, quite simply, in what exactly her friends.h.i.+p with Breton consisted--Ah! then how he would forgive her! How together they would be revenged upon the d.u.c.h.ess!

If she did not speak he did not know what he would do. That old woman's mouth must be stopped; he must find out exactly how far the danger had spread--he must deal with Breton--Now indeed he cursed so that he should be tied to this sofa; there had swept down upon him the hardest trial of his life.

Rachel returned from her party--she sat by his sofa and he lay there looking at her.

Had it been a nice party? Not very--One of those war parties that everyone had now. That silly Lady Meikleham recited "The Absent-minded Beggar," and they had that French tenor from Covent Garden to sing patriotic songs, and of course they got money out of everybody.

There'd been nothing for supper--She'd seen n.o.body amusing--

She broke out: "Roddy dear, what have you been doing with yourself? You look as white and tired as anything--Has that pain in your back----?"

"No, dear,--thank you."

"I _wish_ I hadn't gone, and the dinner at Lady Ma.s.siter's was so stupid--Monty Carfax whom I loathe and Lord Ma.s.siter so dull and stupid--says he's coming to see you to-morrow afternoon."

"Well, he can, I'm at anybody's mercy!"

She got up, stood over him for a moment looking so tall and slender, so dark with diamonds in her black hair, so lovely to-night!

She looked down upon him, then suddenly bent and kissed him.

"Roddy----"

"What is it, dear?" He caught her hand so fiercely that she cried:

"Roddy dear, I----"

"Yes."

"Oh, nothing, only you look so tired, I wish _I_ could take some of the pain----"

"There isn't any, dear, I'm wonderfully lucky."

Peters came in to take him to bed.

She kissed him again and left him.

"Looking done up to-night, sir," said Peters.

"I am," said Roddy.

CHAPTER IV